Tag Archives: viewpoint

I’m working on a Twine game with a similar storytelling style to the 1995 Lucasarts game Full Throttle.

I noticed a storytelling element within the game, and I was wondering what type of story/narration the game could be considered to have.

The game opens with the protagonist, Ben, saying a few lines that set the scene and set up the story. It almost sounds as if he’s telling the player a story.

But then, the cutscenes involve events that Ben is not present for and may not logically know about. Examples, which involve spoilers, are: All events while Ben is passed out in a dumpster in the game opening, a lot of the hovercraft police officers dialogue, the murder of Malcolm Corley, Ripburger’s henchmen chasing down the reporter who photographed the murder and attempting to murder Maureen, and a few more, further into the story, that I’m missing.

But the game also has the live element that comes with being a game, and it involves Ben’s narration and comments based on the action menu, as well as through conversations.

I’ve been trying to figure out how this storytelling style would work within a text-only game. It seems like it could be a type of frame story? Many important details would be missed if the perspective stuck solely to Ben, as it’s also, in a way, the story of the other major characters in the story.

I know I can’t perfectly translate it because while they have similar natures, they’re also significantly different styles of games. But I also feel that to capture the feel of FT, I should employ a similar writing style, which to me seems like a sort of framed, first person semi-omniscient type of thing.

If you have any advice, I’d love to know!

This question feels like it’s asking several things at once:

Terminology. What do we call the viewpoint of a game that sometimes shows you things that the player character is not present to see, especially in the case that the player character is otherwise the narrator?

Canon. Are there other text-based games that do anything like this? How do they handle it?

Craft. How would one introduce these scenes in a way that feels natural, considering they don’t include the protagonist?

This still isn’t nearly into the shape I would use if I were actually going to write this book — and I don’t have time to do any such thing right now anyway; I have a bunch of things to do for Inform 7, feelies.org, and the long-neglected theory book before I could take up a project of this magnitude. (And I’d like to have a little time to work on a WIP of my own — IF support work has pretty much wiped out my time for that kind of thing lately.) But possibly people will find the brainstorming interesting, even if it isn’t worked up into a complete document.